Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

But Oganj wasn’t listening. There was a shine of greed in his eyes now, and he studied Zorian with increased focus now.

"You are the one who has the imperial orb, right? The one with the portable palace inside?" Oganj suddenly asked. He didn’t wait for Zorian’s answer. "Throw that in as well and I’ll leave the city and trouble you no more."

"Oganj, you son of a bitch!" Jornak raged.

"Done," Zorian said. He didn’t even think twice about giving up the imperial orb. Losing it was painful, but his need of making the dragon mage go away was greater.

He could always try to recover it later.

He withdrew the imperial orb out of his pocket and threw it at the angel, accelerating it telekinetically like he did the crown. The angel caught it easily, sequestering it safely with its branches.

" I hereby make a promise, backed by the high heavens, that if you leave the city now and stay away from it for 24 hours, I will give you these two artifacts that have been entrusted to me just now,"the angel told the dragon mage. "May the high heavens strip me of my rank and strike me down should I break it."

"Hmm," Oganj hummed appreciatively. "I wouldn’t trust most creatures, but an angel wouldn’t lie. I accept."

And then Oganj turned towards the northern forest in the distance and simply flew away from the city. The angel seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if it wanted to tell Zorian something, before it simply followed after the dragon mage.

Jornak was clearly fuming with anger right now, but he still wasn’t willing to quit. If anything, his attacks on Zach started getting more frenzied and reckless, his breathing harder and harder.

Zorian took a deep breath. It was time. There would never be any better time than this.

His mind blended with that of his simulacrums. The network of sigils he had scattered across the city sprung into life, giving him reach across the entire city. The multitude of aranea he had brought into the city, mostly quiet until now, established contact with his mind.

He used a short-range teleportation spell to transport himself as close as possible to the two fighters.

And then he lunged at both of them.

He was Zach Noveda, the last surviving member of Noble House Noveda, the chosen of the angels…

…and he had won.

He honestly never thought he would win. He wanted to win, of course. He wanted to know what kind of wonders the world beyond this month had in store for him. He wanted to rebuild his house and make his caretaker pay for what he had done to him. He wanted to have friends and lovers that would never forget him. But this wish… it was merely a wistful dream, flickering in the back of his mind and refusing to die. He didn’t seriously consider it, and not just because of the stupid angel contract and its impossible conditions. The truth was, he’d kind of given up a long time ago.

He had tried to beat the invasion so many times, attempt after attempt, idea after idea, until eventually, he became convinced this was his fate. To stay there forever, in an endlessly looping world. All this power and knowledge, all the revelations about his past life, all the insights into people around him… the time loop dangled these things over his head, but it was all meaningless because he couldn’t get out.

Stopping the invasion of Cyoria was the key. He knew this. Somehow, deep down in his soul, he knew this. But he couldn’t do it, no matter how many times he tried. It was fine while he was still learning things, becoming a better mage, and brimming with ideas… but slowly, he started to slow down. He had learned everything he possibly could about the invaders themselves. Advancing his magic became harder and harder, each new spell or training method giving ever smaller improvements. His inspiration began to dry out.

And yet he still couldn’t get out. He was as best as he realistically would ever be, and yet it wasn’t enough to stop the invasion. His best wasn’t enough. That’s when he realized he wouldn’t be getting out.

He wouldn’t ever be getting out.

And then he met Zorian. His friend was… alright. He scared him with his behavior from time to time, and he wished he was easier to talk to and more fun to hang out with, but hey. You can’t have everything. More importantly, he was driven . He had that spark to keep going that had mostly died in Zach a long time ago. He had ideas that would have never even occurred to Zach, and methods that were alien to Zach’s way of thinking. It was new and refreshing, and it reignited that spark of hope in him that refused to fully die.

A long time ago, when Zach had only began figuring out the time loop and his skills were still growing, his pride would have bristled at the idea of just letting his new friend take the lead in how they should proceed with their escape plan or go about honing their skills. Alas, that was a long time ago. By the time Zach met Zorian, the time loop has already grounded him, and he was entirely content to simply act as support. He stepped aside and let Zorian plan their escape and set their short-term goals, trusting his new friend to get them out of their looping nightmare and simply steering his away from his more… dubious choices.

In the end, that path had led him here: locked in a deadly battle against his other time travelling companion – Red Robe. Or Jornak. Whatever. He would always be Red Robe to Zach, in all honesty. Even now he was wearing that stupid red robe of his to hide his appearance.

He had trapped Zach in some kind of strange dimensional labyrinth, at first – a mirror image of the city covered in thick mist that severely limited Zach’s vision while allowing Red Robe to move around in some strange manner that Zach found hard to understand at first. Red Robe clearly thought of him as some kind of dumb brute that wouldn’t be able to deal with this kind of environment, but Zach hadn’t spent all those years in the time loop for nothing, and his knowledge of dimensionalism had reached incredible heights while he had been working with Zorian and others to create a viable escape route into the real world.

Red Robe bragged a lot about this misty labyrinth world while he and Zach fought. An attempt to demoralize him, maybe? Maybe he couldn’t see all that well in there either, and wanted Zach to verbally respond so he could lock onto his position more securely? In any case, Red Robe said this misty world was primordial magic granted to him by Panaxeth. A place isolated from the real world, impossible to escape.

Place largely removed from the real world… impossible to escape… ha. Wasn’t that almost exactly the description of the time loop? Hadn’t Zach helped Zorian learn how to punch a hole thought it so he could escape?

Red Robe thought Zach was a dumb brute, but Zach had figured his little trick out within a minute of arriving there. Just like the time loop was centered on Panaxeth, this world of mists was centered around Red Robe. There was no point looking for an exit in the environment around them. The exit was Red Robe.

The fight between them lasted a while, but eventually Zach managed to maneuver things in the right direction. He had to let one of Red Robe’s kinetic spells clip him in the leg, leaving him limping, but it was of no importance. It was a relatively light wound, and he had drunk a potion of regeneration before the battle. His leg would be fine soon enough. What was important was that he used the opportunity to hit Red Robe with a dimensional spell designed specifically to punch holes in these kind of prisons. It was literally one-of-a-kind, a product of their intense research near the end of the time loop, and Red Robe clearly had no idea how to deal with it.